Tory leader declares Brown is 'bust'

London, Sept.29 : The leader of Britain's Conservative Party, David Cameron has launched a major broadside against Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and accused him of being "bust."

On the first day of the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham, The Telegraph quoted Cameron as saying that the prospect of higher taxes was very real under the present regime.

Cameron said: ``We have to ask the question who brought us and our economy to this position? Who was it that spent and spent and borrowed and borrowed and gave us that massive budget deficit?

"The answer is our Prime Minister, the then Chancellor, Gordon Brown - and my message to Gordon Brown is this: You have had your boom and your reputation is now bust.''

The Conservatives announced yesterday their plan for a new Government borrowing watchdog. The new independent organisation, the Office of Budget Responsibility, would monitor all public spending and borrowing.

Cameron said it would stop governments running up excessive debts while giving the Bank of England new powers to rein in reckless lending by banks.

He would also scrap Gordon Brown's discredited fiscal rules which require the Government to balance the books over the economic cycle and keep state borrowing below 40 per cent of national income.

It would produce economic forecasts, rather than the Chancellor on Budget Day. The body would not be able to force the Chancellor to act in a certain way but, he would have to explain to Parliament why he disagrees.

But Labour said that Cameron had no credible ideas about how to deal with the current turmoil in the markets.

Yvette Cooper, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, told the BBC that Cameron's team "frankly does not understand the nature of what's at stake here and the nature of the way in which the financial system is operating under the pressures of the credit crunch''.

--ANI